Swetnam The Woman-Hater - Performance and Publication

Performance and Publication

Swetnam the Woman-Hater was first published in 1620, in a quarto issued by Richard Meighen. The title page of the quarto states that the play was performed by Queen Anne's Men at the Red Bull Theatre; the most likely date for the first performance is considered to have been in late 1618 or 1619. The play was not reprinted in its own era (in fact, not until 1880); but it was revived onstage around 1633.

In one key respect, the Red Bull Theatre was an odd venue for the play Swetnam and its positive and genteel attitude toward women. The Red Bull had a reputation as the roughest and rowdiest of the theatres of its day, and at least one source suggests that some women avoided it. According to a contemporaneous doggerel,

The Red Bull

Is mostly full

Of drovers, carriers, carters;

But honest wenches

Will shun the benches

And not there show their garters.

Perhaps the Red Bull audience mellowed with time; or perhaps it was never as narrow and mean as reputed, as A. B. Grosart suggests in his edition of the play.

Conversely, Queen Anne's Men may have chosen the play to appeal to the "up-scale" new audience they wanted to serve. In 1617, the Queen Anne's company moved from the open-air, "public" Red Bull to the enclosed "private" theatre the Cockpit, which had a more "elite" clientele. But the crowds of apprentices who made up a large portion of the company's audience were outraged at the move. The private theatres' ticket prices were five or six times higher than the public theatres' admission fees. (In the Jacobean era, the cheapest ticket to the "public" Globe Theatre was a penny, while the minimum for the "private" Blackfriars Theatre was sixpence.) The young men were being priced out of their basic entertainment. In the famous Shrove Tuesday riot of 1617, the 'prentices damaged the Cockpit badly enough to delay its opening, and the Queen's Men had to remain at the Red Bull until repairs were done. Swetnam may have been the kind of play the company intended for their projected new home at the Cockpit.